The Orange Box

Team Fortress 2 is ringing in the holidays in its own inimitable fashion: with robots and weaponry. The "Mecha Update" introduces a Mecha-Engineer to the Mann vs Machine mode, a new MvM map, and three new weapons.

The update includes a "Big Rock" map illustrates why the Mecha-Engie is such a deadly adversary. It's a big map that gives the robot horde a much larger area to cover, but enemy teleporters will get them to you much faster. New tools for the job include the Rescue Ranger (Engineer), Loose Cannon (Demoman), and Vaccinator (Medic). Finally, the holiday season brings back last year's "Naughty" and "Nice" crates, full of yule-tide weapons and winter-themed items, respectively. They'll be available until January 3.

Santa Tux has visited early this year, dragging an open beta version of Steam's Linux client behind his Gentoo-powered sleigh. Now, all who've embraced the free software revolution can try and test Valve's crack at making Linux a viable gaming platform. Now, stop me if you've heard this before, but next year will surely be The Year of the Linux Desktop.

The beta client installer is over here. It includes a Linux version of Team Fortress 2, but the Steam store already stocks a fair few games with Linux versions so you'll have plenty to play.

Gabe Newell has said that it's looking at releasing its own Linux PC hardware for living rooms once Steam Linux and the sofa-oriented Big Picture mode are in fit shape.

The Black Mesa mod is a remarkable accomplishment, remaking Half-Life in the Source engine, and now a mapper building upon their work has remade another slice of Valve history. Black Mesa: Uplink remakes HL's classic Uplink demo, which curiously for a demo was a new slice based upon levels cut from the game during development. And now that's available in shiny Source-o-vision.

Black Mesa: Uplink is out now on its ModDB page and here on Shacknews. To play, you'll need to own a modern Source game on Steam and have the Black Mesa mod installed. Mapper Michael 'Hezus' Jansen made Uplink over three months, building upon the assets and eight years of work from Black Mesa.

Set roughly around Half-Life's Lambda Core chapter, Uplink sees Gordon Freeman on a mission to activate a radio antenna so people can escape, only an awful lot of soldiers, mutants, aliens, radiation leaks and jumping puzzles are in his way.

"I've recreated something people played 13 years ago, that means it's intertwined with nostalgic feelings," Jansen said in the release announcement. "Have I recreated it according to their past experience? Have I changed too much? Have I changed too little? All I know is that I threw away all illusions that I could please everyone with this remake, right when I started the project. I made it as I saw fit and I hope the commentary tracks will shed some light on my choices."

Valve has taken the next logical step for Team Fortress 2's bustling hat-based economy, by introducing actual money into the equation. The Steam "Community Market" entered beta today, a test bed that allows users to exchange Steam Wallet funds for items instead of simply trading.

The beta only works with TF2, and even then only with consumable items, but Valve promises it will be available with other titles next year. You can show off your items on the Community and sell or trade them to other Steam users. According to a FAQ, all sales are final. Steam keeps a 15% transaction fee during the beta period, which may increase in the future. During the beta, sales are restricted to 200 per calendar year, starting with January 1. Presumably you won't reach 200 before then.

"With over a half million trades made every week, the trading system has been very successful," said Valve's Tony Paloma. "Extending game economies beyond trades and giving players a way to turn gameplay into funds for new items and games is a key component for moving that success forward."

So to summarize: Team Fortress 2 started with clothing items, which led to barter and trade, and finally the advent of currency. Use this handy metaphor to teach your kids about the development of economics in western civilization, because it happened exactly the same way. That progression is almost definitely because of this guy.

Team Fortress 2's bustling hat-based economy is getting another rare addition, thanks to the launch of Scribblenauts Unlimited. Pre-ordering the game through Steam before it launches next week will get you a choice of Maxwell or Lily's rooster hats, which honestly aren't that much sillier than the other hat options in TF2.

Maxwell's comes in red and Lily's in pink. The hats will be available as soon as you pre-order Scribblenauts, so you don't have to wait for its November 20 release date to don your rooster cap. Scribblenauts Unlimited is also planned for the Wii U, but of course, you don't get to wear a ridiculous looking hat that way.

Steam, Valve's popular portal for PC games, is now available on Linux. The beta client is currently available for Ubuntu 12.04, with more OS variants to be supported in the future. Valve's Frank Crockett explained that "an overwhelming majority of beta applicants have reported they're running the Ubuntu distro of Linux," but Valve plans on supporting additional "popular distros," prioritized by user feedback.

The beta client will become available to "a widening group of users," but the first round is currently reserved for those that have already responded to participate. "Once the team has seen a solid level of stability and performance across a variety of systems, the Steam for Linux client will become available to all users of Steam."

To coincide with the launch of Steam for Linux, Valve has released Team Fortress 2 for the platform. Valve says that approximately two dozen other games are also available to play, but the list is currently inaccessible.

The Linux client also includes support for Big Picture mode. It's all part of Valve's larger bet on Linux as a platform, as the company openly criticized Microsoft's new Windows 8 OS.

Every year around this time, the light-hearted (albeit bloody) world of Team Fortress 2 gets a little bit darker. Past years have brought a horseless headless horseman and Demonman. The fourth annual "Scream Fortress" update brings a necromancer with a grudge and some magic potions in tow.

The update goes live today and lasts through November 8. As usual, it ties into a new comic that plays with the premise. The magician Merasmus will enter haunted King of the Hill maps to terrorize your crew, throwing bombs and booby-trapping the control points. Each time a point changes hands, a random effect will trigger some "horrible fate." Or possibly something good, but you know, more likely the horrible fate thing.

You'll also randomly find spells that you can cast on items in your backpack, giving them magical effects like ghost summoning or flaming footsteps, or more modest ones like repainting your items. One spell promises to make you an evil sorcerer.

The new "Wave 666" replaces your usual Machine co-op opponents with brain-hungry zombies, and you can score two new achievements -- one for beating Merasmus, and one for getting to Skull Island.

When Team Fortress 2 launched its Mann vs Machine update, it finally added a co-op mode to the game. Not content to rest on its laurels, Valve had updated the game with several new tweaks and features.

A post on the TF2 Blog spills the details. For starters, the new update includes two more Tours of Duty to sate those who found the first one too easy or too hard. Operation Oil Spill should prove less of a challenge, and Operation Gear Grinder is for those who laugh in the face of danger.

You can also look forward to new Tour-specific loot, including rusty robot heads for Oil Spill, and 24-carat diamond heads for the Gear Grinder. The update also boasts improved match-making, which lets you select from multiple missions. Finally, after a mission is over, you'll be sent back to the matchmaking screen as a group.

If you've been paying any amount of attention to Team Fortress 2, you've probably noticed that it's home to some of Valve's wackier ideas. The company says it may not have started as a test bed, but it's certainly become one as it's used to experiment with new strategies.

"In the end, TF2 has been ended up being one of the most useful tools we've ever built to reduce risk in our company's future," lead designer Robin Walker said.

"It's been really nice that it's also brought in significant revenue throughout that time, but ultimately, the importance we place on understanding our business and our customers has made it totally worthwhile." Walker told Gamasutra that without TF2, Valve's lack of experience in monetization would be "terrifying."

He says the hidden goal for TF2 was to explore ideas that "were potentially a requirement for the long-term survival of the company." When the game first came out, it appeared that MMOs were going to take over the market, so Valve started building persistent items. When the free-to-play market rose, it used TF2 as a test bed for microtransactions. The gambles seem to be paying off, as the game continues to evolve and remain popular.

Grab your crowbars and spectacles, everyone. The Source engine fan remake of the original Half-Life is now available. It went live at 8:47 AM Mountain Time, which should sound awfully familiar to fans. The labor of love has taken eight years and has added a few notable tweaks to the classic, with at least one more revision on the way post-launch.

The Source mod has added some new bits of dialogue, and plans to make revisions to the Xen portion of the game sometime in the future. It opted to remove that part completely from the initial release. Other than those changes, it will be a much prettier version of Half-Life. The excitement was enough to garner a spot in the first batch of Steam's Greenlight program, and chances are we have more than a few Half-Life enthusiasts in the Shacknews audience.